McConnell and my saga with polio

Monday

Jul 31, 2017 at 5:29 PMJul 31, 2017 at 5:29 PM

Republicans minus the smart ones that helped sink this latest sickening (pardon the pun) Republican health care bill are malevolent monsters. In Republican leader Mitch McConnell's autobiographical book he says his main goal was to do the Party's business and make it successful; not to do America's business mind you, but the business of the 2 percent wealthiest in the nation. He is a brutal beast second only to Trump. I cannot believe McConnell had polio as a kid the same as I did. He supposedly had painful long hours of remaining still which gave him the allegedly patient temperament to become the evil monstrosity that he is.

As one who had the dreaded disease polio and suffers to this day from post-polio symptoms one would think one would have a heart for children, at least, and adults, too, who get other crushing cost diseases through no fault of their own. Polio made Franklin Roosevelt and me more empathetic persons as we both suffered total limb paralysis. My father could not afford the costs of that disease at that time which, even then, were astronomical and insurance, of course, did not cover it as polio was a preexisting condition.

Thank you FDR and Basil O'Connor who began the March of Dimes. We had to rely on that charity to pay the years' long costs of treatment until age 16 including continual hospital visits, casts, braces, corsets, x-rays, crutches, skin temperature tests, special shoes, rehab, two painful surgeries when young as well as multiple falls with femur fractures and surgery from those falls when older. I surely know what can befall a family that did not think a dastardly disease could happen to their child. But it did to mine and if not for the March of Dimes my father would have had to have filed bankruptcy, -- you know -- the legal business status our not-fit-to-be-president president knows so well. My father worked hard to obtain the best treatment to afford me a life free from the difficulties of deformities that polio bestows over decades if not given proper treatment and supervision.

No wonder FDR is my hero and the Democratic Party is my home. If it were not for both I may have ended up in the street as so many will if Republicans work their evil magic denying health care to all.